Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1895 — War Dogs. [ARTICLE]

War Dogs.

The war dogs belonging to the German army, which were shown at the Sporting Exhibition at Dresden, acquitted themselves remarkably well. The trials were not by any means easy ones, and the fact that the dogs satisfactorily passed them speaks highly for the system of training the animals. On a very complicated road, with many cross-paths, and quite strange to them, the dogs, although maneuvering with troops who were quite unknown to them, and in spite of the heat being most intense, did some excellent dispatch duty. “Tell,” a dog belonging to the Jager Guard Battalion, brought dispatches from a soldier to headquarters, a distance of nearly a mile, in less than two minutes, while the dogs belonging to the Dresden Rifle Corps accomplished the journey in about two minutes. Tests were next made with the dogs as ammunition carriers, each animal carrying on its back a weight equal to 250 ball cartridges, arranged in a kind of saddle, and they showed that in this direction they might be thoroughly relied upon, for they supplied the line of firing troops, who were also strangers to them, with fresh ammunition. The trials wound up by testing the power of the dogs in seeking the wounded on the field of battle, and the intelligent creatures were equally as successful in Red Cross duties as they were in conveying ammunition,